Friendly Skies A Program Called Angel Flight Pairs Chronically Ill Patients With Pilots Who Offer Air Transport

Pilot Steve Pietroburgo spots the feeding tube protruding from Sonja Saenz’s nose and picks up his pace across the airport waiting room.

“That must be them,” he says, tucking his paperwork under one arm as he nears the armchair where Sonja, 6, plays with a friend.

He’s late. Clouds delayed his takeoff from Spokane this morning. He landed his four-seat Piper Archer at Seattle’s Boeing Field 90 minutes off schedule.

He’s volunteered to fly Sonja and her mother, Mona Gonzalez, home to Yakima after Sonja’s treatment at Children’s Hospital. To help these strangers, Pietroburgo took a day off work and paid the flight expenses - about $500.

He’s not thinking about his contributions now. He’s dismayed that his tardiness has caused Gonzalez to worry. His services are supposed to alleviate stress.

`’m Steve, your Angel Flight pilot,” he says, tugging off his red and yellow work gloves to shake her hand. “Gee, I’m sorry we’re so late.”

The mother and daughter are Steve’s seventh assignment for Angel Flight, a 17-year-old program that offers non-critical patients free flights to the medical facilities they need.

Pilots volunteer their time, fuel and equipment. Patients are chronically ill, strapped for money and rural. Both camps are grateful for the opportunity.

“If I can do some good, it’s better than going up and just boring holes in the sky,” says Johnny Stewart, an Orofino, Idaho, pilot and Angel Flight volunteer.

Every flight links the privileged with the poor, and reminds both how important they are to each other.

Pilots learn to cherish their health and appreciate the capacity of the human spirit. Chronic illness reduces even financially secure families to poverty. Still, passengers demonstrate inspiring dignity and fortitude.

Angel Flight volunteer Skip Davis flew a man dying from melanoma a few years ago.

“He shared his reflections on life and living. It was an enlightening experience,” says Davis, executive director of Sacred Heart Medical Center. “These people have done more for my life than I’ve done for theirs.”

Pilot generosity and compassion raise patients’ battered spirits and renew their faith in human kindness.

“They’re really a special group. I get teary-eyed when I think about it,” says Darlyne Dascher, an eastern Montana rancher who’s fighting ovarian cancer. Angel Flight has flown her to the North Idaho Cancer Center in Coeur d’Alene a half dozen times.

“It made things so much easier when I knew I could get a flight and within two hours be there. I didn’t have to face 12 hours of being sick while driving.”

Pietroburgo stumbled upon Angel Flight a year ago in an aviation magazine. The program began in California in 1983 and has spread to 11 western states. The Washington wing took off three years ago in the western part of the state.

It’s all volunteer, from flight coordinators to pilots. The patients who travel are stable, non-contagious and able to climb into a small plane and sit for a few hours.

Everything about Angel Flight excited Pietroburgo. He manages timber for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Colville, where he lives with his wife Kim, son Biagio, 6, and daughter Olivia, 3.

He’s flown solo for seven years.

“I never just wanted to go up on Saturdays and buzz around,” he says.

He hitched himself to Angel Flight at the same time Spokane pilot Melinda Denton discovered the program. Bruce Eggleston, another Spokane pilot, had waited 15 years for enough pilots in eastern Washington and Idaho to show an interest.

“We weren’t ready before,” he says. “Now we are.”

The trio recruited 20 pilots in a year to fly patients who live within about 500 miles of Spokane. Pilots from Eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana worked together to start this region’s wing last year. Even at its smallest, Spokane’s Angel Flight flew everyone who asked.

Pietroburgo, 42, found Sonja’s transportation request on the Angel Flight Web site. He hadn’t flown for a month and was antsy.

He learned to fly seven years ago, after a lifetime of waiting.

“Sometimes I’m sad I missed out on so many years,” he says.

He couldn’t afford a plane of his own, but bought a share in a 1977 Piper Archer with five other pilots. He pays the group $50 for each hour he keeps the plane in the air. The fee covers maintenance, hangar costs and a full fuel tank.

A buzz to a nearby town for lunch - the $100 hamburger, he says - was air time he couldn’t square with his conscience. But he had to fly.

Angel Flight gave him purpose and made him feel good.

“I feel almost guilty about it,” he says. “My wife’s a saint. This is not sacrificial giving. My family sacrifices me for the day, money for the flight. I get so much out of it.”

To raise money to fly, Pietroburgo gave up skiing. He drives a $1,500 pickup, carpools to work and packs his lunches.

“We really can afford to average one Angel Flight a month,” says Pietroburgo’s wife, Kim. “As much as he loves it, and as good a thing as it is, we can’t afford more.”

He usually flies patients into or out of Spokane, but no one had volunteered to fly Sonja home to Sunnyside from Seattle. Pietroburgo signed up.

Sonja’s liver turned against her a few years ago. Doctors diagnosed her with acute autoimmune hepatitis and gave her a week to live without a transplant.

A liver arrived for her after 22 days, but it wasn’t compatible. Sonja lived at Children’s Hospital for 18 months, with few visits home. Her hair fell out. Her nails turned black.

A month before her second transplant last June, Sonja’s father, Daniel, was killed in a car accident. Sonja’s second transplant was successful, but she needs treatments in Seattle indefinitely.

Gonzalez, 27, drove the 500-mile round trip to Seattle twice a week for a while, then two to four times a month. It cost her about $200 a month. Last fall, she turned to Angel Flight.

“I was bound and determined I could do this by myself,” she says. “But I was scared to go over the passes in bad weather. Sonja’s come so far. I don’t want anything stupid to happen.”

Today’s flight is Gonzalez’s fourth. Pietroburgo’s tardiness doesn’t faze her. She’s endured everything the health care system has to offer, and hasn’t lost her optimism.

Sonja sucks the ketchup from a plastic packet while her mother signs an Angel Flight liability waiver. Dark fuzz peeks out from under the blue fishing hat on Sonja’s head. Her swollen stomach fills her jacket and dwarfs her legs.

Rain is pounding onto Boeing Field as Pietroburgo helps Sonja and her mother climb onto the wing of his single-engine plane. Bad weather cancels half his flights. A bigger plane is the answer, he grouses.

Gonzalez follows Sonja into the tan bucket seats in back, and fits bulky green headphones onto her head. Sonja rejects hers and colors instead in her Mickey Mouse coloring book. Her feet just reach the end of the seat.

“Circuit breakers in, carburetor heat off, fuel selection valve on,” Pietroburgo says aloud as he begins his preflight check.

His crocodile-skin Jeppesen Airway Manual tells him everything he needs to know about airports in the region. Charts and maps cover his lap.

“Clear,” he yells out his side window and starts the engine. His brown workboots push the floor pedals.

The tower clears 44Zulu - short for N1144Z, the Piper’s FAA registration number - for takeoff, and the plane skitters down the runway. It rises into the sky like a mosquito.

Wind and rain buffet the plane, but Sonja is oblivious. Her chin dips towards her chest and her eyes close.

Angel Flight’s safety record is flawless. Pilots don’t fly in questionable weather. One hundred twenty missions were cancelled in the 11 western states since January. One hundred seventy-six missions were completed.

Pilots are FAA licensed and flight tested for Angel Flight by a certified flight instructor. Patients know they need backup transportation plans if they can’t change a medical appointment.

Gayle Silveria’s daughter, Ellie, panicked on a bumpy Angel Flight home to Lewiston from Spokane, so the pilot returned to Spokane and landed. Silveria’s husband drove his family home instead.

Storms over the Bitterroots cancelled two flights from Bozeman to Spokane for Kayleen Cox, 2, last winter. Kayleen was heading to Shriner’s Children’s Hospital for a checkup after doctors there corrected her spinal disk problem.

Her mother, Heleen Bloethe, rescheduled the appointments.

“It’s not a big deal,” she says. “What Angel Flight offers is just priceless.”

Weather is Angel Flight’s biggest obstacle in the Inland Northwest. Pilot shortage is its second.

“We would use Angel Flight more if more pilots were available,” says Amy Colbert, a social worker at the North Idaho Cancer Center in Coeur d’Alene. She called Angel Flight to help four patients in the last year.

Social workers usually contact Angel Flight on behalf of a patient, and confirm that the person is needy.

Shriner’s, too, can use more Angel Flight pilots. The nonprofit orthopedic and burn scar-repair center doesn’t charge patients for services or transportation to its hospital.

Shriner’s fraternal organization raises money to pay for everything. Angel Flight’s free air service is a godsend to the group.

“The last time we had a burn child flown out of Bozeman, it cost $13,000 for an ambulance plane,” says Joe Morris, a Shriner in Butte’s Bagdad Temple. “We appreciate that Angel Flight gives us the opportunity to save transportation money and help more kids.”

A recent Angel Flight pilots’ meeting in Spokane brought together financial advisers, real estate brokers and retired airline pilots. Orofino’s Stewart is a smoke chaser for the Clearwater Potlatch Timber Protection Association.

Idaho wing leader Mike Worley is the commander of internal affairs for the Boise police department. Coeur d’Alene’s Buck Bender is a retired U.S. Air Force pilot. He just joined Angel Flight with his wife, Marjorie, who’s also a pilot.

Spokane’s Terry Judge is a retired cardiologist. He used to fly to patients in such rural areas as Omak, Wash., Grangeville, Idaho, and Libby, Mont. He’s Angel Flight’s evangelist now, spreading the word to health centers, aviation gatherings and civic groups.

“I retired before Angel Flight started here, but I would have used it had it been here,” Judge says. “It’s anguishing that patients with chronic illness can’t afford repetitive trips for medical treatment.”

Love of flying bonds this group, but so does a commitment to sharing their good fortune.

“We can all give money to church or give to causes,” says Spokane’s Denton. “But there are only 600,000 pilots in the U.S.

“Few of us have the opportunity to donate this kind of service.”

Sonja wakes as 44Zulu descends into Yakima’s McAllister Field, and finds two little teddy bears Pietroburgo left in back for her. Gonzalez spots her other children, Marcel, 5, and Sofia, 3, waiting on the tarmac with their grandmother.

Gonzalez is afraid to fly, but she kept her promise to Sonja - she didn’t cry. And she’ll fly again, she tells Pietroburgo as she thanks him over and over.

Pietroburgo pulls off his blue ballcap in Yakima’s terminal and massages his brow while he calls his wife. It’s 4 p.m. He hasn’t had lunch. He grabs a Snickers, studies a chart and heads back to 44Zulu.

“I know if I couldn’t fly, I’d sink into a depression, be a bad father,” he says as if he truly believes he has such potential.

“You meet people like Mona (Gonzalez) and realize your problems aren’t that big. There’s an interconnectedness that’s hard to ignore here. She needs me, and I need her for inspiration.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: ANGEL FLIGHT Camp Goodtimes

Angel Flight will fly children fighting cancer to the American Cancer Society’s Camp Goodtimes June 25 to July 1. The free camp uses YMCA’s Camp Reed and expects about 150 children from as far as Yakima, eastern Montana and northeast Oregon.

Children ages 7-17 are eligible for the camp if they’re being treated for cancer or have had cancer.

Applications are due May 1. Call (800) 537-7710 for information.

To volunteer for Angel Flight, call (888) 426-2643.